I believe the huge debt the country has accumulated, and our massive annual deficits are very dangerous. We are lucky the interest rate is very low and the cost of the debt (which has to be paid in real money) is fairly cheap right now. The slightest increase in inflation and lending rates will suddenly push our interest costs up to levels where we will not have enough money to operate the government causing a huge increase in borrowing (printing) driving inflation up even more and eventually downgrading US sovereign credit making the problem spiral out of control. I believe this could happen tomorrow, not in several years. All the ingredients are in place now. The warning signs are numerous.

Consequently, I think very large historic cuts in government spending have to be made. Numerous cabinet-level agencies closed, thousands of government programs cut or stopped all together. This I believe argues for a paradigm shift (back) to one of more self-reliance and less dependency on government. So to answer your question, I think the weight needs to shift more in favor of the individual and/or the states and away from a large federal government we cannot afford. Its not really a philosophical shift, as much as it is out of necessity. Simple arithmetic knows no ideology is. Math is math.

"Regardless of what this land has looked like very bad things happened due to White paternalism towards Native peoples and their children on this land in the 19th and early 20th century. Your denial of our historical and cultural connection to that land is just an extention of this paternalism."

OK Tuschy, have it you way. On behalf of everyone on this blog, especially the white ones, I acknowledge that the white people who settled this part of Kansas were not always nice to the indiginous people who lived here at the time. I further stipulate that some of those indiginous people may have had a connection to the land the SLT is going through. You are 100% right on both counts. People who deny these two points are just being paternalistic like you say. Me and everyone else AGREES with you. These two points have never been in dispute. There. You have it writting. Save it. Frame it. Cherish it.

My question is: So what?

The land has been private property since before you and I were born. Your two "facts" do not in any way deprive the owners of the land from their ability to exercise their private property rights. The courts have ruled and said as much.

This is a fact too, but you won't acknowledge this, will you? If you did the pretext for your histrionics would end, wouldn't it?

Darn good information. Too bad the renters didn't avail themselves of it sooner and perhaps compell the landlord into holding up his end of the bargain.

I am curious though. Something doesn't make sense. Were I forced to live in a rental that was so poorly maintained it was merely waiting for a city code inspector to condemn it, I sure wouldn't be paying any rent. Why would someone pay rent if they could easily prove the landlord's failure to maintain the property was a breech of contract, assuming I actually had a lease in a dump like that.

You hear stories of apartments full of free loaders who won't pay their rent. The cost, time, and effort required to evict them one by one is cost prohibative, so the land lord just lets the place go to crap in an effort to drive the bums out.

I wonder what happened in this case? The story just says the landlord was negligent. It doesn't say the 13 renters were honest, rent-paying tenants. Were they?

Government taxing food in the first place is wrong, probably even immoral, but what to do about taxing the so-called poor low income people. Hummm….

The state can impose a politically-motivated line in the sand (that has nothing to do with socioeconomic realities) pick winners and losers, and forego some tax revenue to subsidize what the elites believe to be the poor low income people.

or…

It can allow the people who work for and earn the money in the first place to keep more of what is theirs. After all, the state has no money. It has to take every penny it spends from someone who earned it.

What speaks for itself here is the fact many believe a person has no right to exist for their own sake, that service to others is the only justification for their existence. They believe the best use of the State’s power is to plunder more money from those who earn it.

Of course they miss the point. The best thing you can do for a poor person is help them find work that pays them more money. The best social program on Earth is a good job, not another government hand out. Didn’t I just read an article in the LJW that says Kansas unemployment now stands at a four-year low?